(August 2003) Imagine a typical drive through the countryside. As you look out your window, you notice a farm. There are cows and sheep grazing on grass, chickens in the coop and pigs in the sty. However, this is no ordinary farm. What you don’t see is a blood clotting factor being produced in the cow’s milk, strong yet light-weight spider silk proteins being produced in the sheep, vaccines in the chicken eggs and that the pigs are destined to be a source of transplant organs (xenotransplantation). No, this is no ordinary farm. This farm of the future is actually…

(August 2003) In the early days of genetics, scientists did not have the resources to look at more than a few genes at a time. This made the process of understanding the influence of genetics on an organism slow and arduous. Scientists were faced with the enormous task of attempting to understand genetic influence with little information to complete the task. The understanding of genes would have been very helpful in solving this problem. The year 1995 saw the completion of the first two complete non-viral genomes, Haemophilus influenzae [1] and Mycoplasma genitalium [1], two bacteria that can cause human…